Philip Glass

Philip Morris Glass is an American composer. He is considered one of the most influential music makers of the late 20th century. His music is also often controversially described as minimal music, along with the work of the other major minimalists La160Monte Young, Terry Riley and Steve Reich.

Glass was born on January 31, 1937, in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of Ida and Benjamin Charles Glass. His family were Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. His mother was a librarian and his father owned a record store. Glasss record collection consisted to a large extent of unsold records from his fathers store and included modern classical music such as Hindemith, Bartk, Schoenberg, Shostakovich and Western classical music including Beethovens string quartets and Schuberts B Piano Trio. Glass cites Schuberts work as a big influence at an early age. He studied the flute as a child at the universitypreparatory school of the Peabody Institute. At the age ofhe entered an accelerated college program at the University of Chicago where he studied mathematics and philosophy. In Chicago he discovered the serialism of Anton Webern and composed a twelvetone string trio. In 1954 Glass went to Paris for the first time, encountering the films of Jean Cocteau, which made a lasting impression on

Source: Wikipedia